SKU: HL.49045305

ISBN 9781495082405. UPC: 888680656539. 9.0x12.0x0.256 inches.

Following the premiere of my opera An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera, the President of the Manhattan School of Music, Robert Sirota, called me and told me that the American String Quartet had asked him to commission me as part of the school's 90th anniversary celebration. I was very excited because this meant that the first new music I would compose after my largest piece ever would be a string quartet for my alma mater. I embraced the chance to return to chamber music with gusto because I saw this not only as an opportunity to incorporate everything I'd learned writing four grand operas into an intimate yet profound genre but also as the starting point of a new direction in my compositional thinking. 20 years separate my first and second quartet and it is not difficult to hear the evolution between the two. Tobias Picker.

SKU: HL.49004036

ISBN 9790001040785. 8.25x11.75x0.262 inches.

Inhaltliche Tiefe, uberschaumende Lebendigkeit und Raffinesse der Kompositionstechnik' - lobt Samuel Rhodes, der Bratschist des renommierten Juilliard String Quartet, Paul Hindemiths Streichquartette. Der Komponist entwarf das Quartett op. 10 1918 an der Front im Elsass, und doch zeigt es nicht den kleinsten Einfluss der schrecklichen Kriegsereignisse. Das dreisatzige Werk ist voll jugendlichen Uberschwangs und spiegelt Hindemiths neue Kompositionstechniken wider. Seine Meisterschaft und Fantasie im Gebrauch der Instrumente beweisen, dass er mit der Gattung Streichquartett schon vollig vertraut war.

SKU: HL.49045639

ISBN 9781540004796. UPC: 888680710774. 9.5x12.0x0.37 inches.

Chaconne (2016), for string quartet, was commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet to celebrate its 15th anniversary. The commission was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and Aaron Copland Fund for Music.My music has a substantial history with Daedalus. I composed the Third String Quartet (2008) for them, and subsequently they performed my three string quartets on several occasions and recorded them brilliantly on Bridge Records (Bridge 9352: Music of Fred Lerdahl, vol. 3). Chaconne is in one movement lasting 19 minutes. It is effectively my fourth string quartet. Quartets 1-3 form a unified cycle lasting 70 minutes. When I finished the cycle, I thought I would never write again for the medium; yet I could not resist the opportunity of working again with Daedalus. The issue was how to compose another string quartet unrelated to the earlier cycle. The solution came from my solo cello piece There and Back Again (2010), which was based on a four-bar variation pattern from a 17th-century chaconne. Unlike the asymmetrical phrases and expanding variations of much of my music, the chaconne form requires symmetrical phrases and strictly periodic variations. I wished to work again with these symmetries but on a larger scale. Chaconne also differs in character and expression from the three-quartet cycle. The cycle is inward and intense, a kind of psychological excavation. Chaconne is, for the most part, transparent and playful. Many of its textures emerge from little canons, not completely unlike the rounds that children sing. Any composer who writes in chaconne form (one thinks above all of the last movement of Bach's D minor violin partita and the finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony) is confronted with the challenge of how to create a larger form out of a constantly repeating pattern.My Chaconne grows from paired antecedent-consequent phrases, each variation lasting eight bars. The 50 variations group into three large rotations, forming three arcs of tension and relaxation, with subtle parallel connections across the rotations. Notwithstanding my attraction to chaconne form, I purposefully disguised its symmetries and periodicities in order to build an overall dramatic shape. Fred Lerdahl.

SKU: HL.49015639

UPC: 884088271312. 9.0x12.0x0.304 inches.

Ein Divertimento im besten Sinn ist dieses Fruhwerk des spateren Dadaisten und Komponisten des Kommunistischen Manifests. Es verbindet bei nicht zu hohem Schwierigkeitsgrad Spielfreude und Klangsinnlichkeit der bohmischen Streichertradition. Besonders gelungen der vierte Satz: ein Wettstreit von Bratsche und erster Violine um den schoneren Romanzenton.